Education

2010-present Post-doc in the group of Frances Arnold as a DAAD stipendiary

2009-2010 Post-Doc with Prof. Niemeyer

2005-2009 phD work in the group of Prof. Niemeyer at University of Dortmund, Germany, on Protein-DNA-conjugates. Title of thesis: "Herstellung rekombinanter Proteine für die Synthese von DNA-Protein-Konjugaten". Mark: summa cum laude ("Ausgezeichnet")

Artwork

During my stay at Leiden University, where I did some NMR on transient protein complexes, I got into first contact with raytracing. At the moment I am using Swissprot Deepview and Chimera to work with .pdb files and Moray to set up whole scences. For rendering I usually use povray3.6 (esp. to generate .png files with transparent background). For the coverpicture shown below I used a combination of all programs.

I worked a lot with the thermostable P450 CYP119A1, therefore I prepared a little movie for my PhD defence (on the right).
In this movie you can see the P450 enzyme CYP119A1 with the inhibitor phenylimidazol bound to the active site. First, the overall fold is shown with the α-helices displayed in blue, the β-sheets in green and turns in grey. Subsequently the van-der-waals surface of the protein is displayed. Then the camera zooms into the active center. You can nicely see that "underneath" the central iron in the heme cofactor there is a cystein as fifth ligand and that the inhibitor occupies the sixth coordinationsite.
Afterwards the camera zooms out again and the primary amine groups on the surface of the protein are shown.
The movie was prepared from the threedimensional structure 1F4T with the program Chimera and re-coded to the .ogg format using the SUPER Encoder.